Just no one human.”
“What could, then?”
“A demon.”
Far above our pay grade.
Dawes took a long, shuddering breath and pushed her hair back from her face, re-fastening her bun. “Do you think Sandow will want coffee when he gets here?” she asked
as she retrieved her headphones from the parlor carpet. “I want to work for a while.”
“How’s it going?”
“The dissertation?” Dawes blinked slowly, looked down at the headphones in her hand
as if wondering how they’d gotten there. “I have no idea.”
“I’ll order pizza,” said Alex. “And I’m taking first shower. We both reek.”
“I’ll open a bottle of wine.”
Alex was halfway up the stairs when she heard the knock at the door. For a second, she
thought it might be Dean Sandow. But why would he knock? In the six months she’d been
a part of Lethe, no one had knocked at Orange.
“Dawes—” she began.
“Let me in.” A male voice, loud and angry through the door.
Alex’s feet had carried her all the way to the base of the stairs before she realized it.
Compulsion.
“Dawes, don’t!” she cried. But Dawes was already unlocking the door.
The lock clicked and the door slammed inward. Dawes was thrown back against the
banister, headphones flying from her hand. Alex heard a loud crack as her head connected with the wood.
Alex didn’t stop to think. She snatched up Dawes’s headphones and shoved them down
over her ears, using her hands to keep them tight to her head as she ran up the stairs. She
glanced back once and saw Blake Keely—beautiful Blake Keely, the shoulders of his wool coat dusted with snow as if he’d emerged from the pages of a catalog—step over Dawes’s body, his eyes locked on Alex.
Dawes will be okay, she told herself. She has to be okay. You can’t help her if you lose control.
Blake was using Starpower or something like it. Alex had felt the pull of it in his voice
through the door. It was the only reason Dawes had flipped the lock.
She bolted toward the armory, punching Turner’s number into her phone, and slammed
her hand against the old stereo panel on the wall by the library, hoping that for once it would oblige. Maybe the house was fighting alongside her, because music boomed
through the hallways, louder and clearer than she’d ever heard it before. When Darlington had been around, it would have been Purcell or Prokofiev. Instead, it was the last thing Dawes had listened to—if Alex hadn’t been so frightened, she would have laughed as Morrissey’s warble and the jangle of guitars filled the air.
The words were muted by the headphones, the sound of her own breathing loud in her
ears. She hurtled into the armory, throwing open drawers. Dawes was down and bleeding.
Turner was far away. And Alex didn’t want to think about what Blake might do to her, what he might make her do. Would it be revenge for what she’d done? Had he figured out
who she was and somehow followed her here? Or was it Tara who had brought him to her
door? Alex had been so focused on the societies, she hadn’t noticed another suspect right
in front of her—a pretty boy with a rotten core who didn’t like the word “no.”
She needed a weapon, but nothing in the armory was made to fight a living, human body hyped up on super charisma.
Alex glanced over her shoulder. Blake was right behind her. He was saying something,
but thankfully she couldn’t hear him over the music. She reached into the drawers, grabbing anything heavy she could find to throw. She wasn’t even sure what priceless thing she was hurling at him. An astrolabe. A glittering paperweight with a sea frozen inside it.
Blake batted them aside and seized the back of her neck. He was strong from lacrosse
and vanity. He tore the headphones from her ears. Alex screamed as loud as she could and
raked her nails across his face. Blake shrieked and she fled down the hall. She’d fought monsters before. She’d won. But not on her own. She needed to get outside, away from
the wards, where she could draw on North’s strength or find another Gray to help her.